Show HN: A Sign In Space – simulating a message from ET
asignin.spaceOver the past few months I had the privilege to be part of a team of artists and researchers who assembled a hypothetical message from ET for A Sign in Space, a project founded and directed by media artist Daniela de Paulis.
The message was loaded on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a spacecraft orbiting Mars. On May 24th it was beamed back to Earth and received by several radio telescopes during a live performance.
Since then, a community of people from all walks of life has been attempting to make sense of the message. If you enjoy the challenge, join the discord channel https://discord.com/channels/1066055437457297469/11114043296... and give it a try! My immediate thoughts after a couple minutes: The message has length 65697, and it's extremely sparse (mostly zeroes) except for the beginning and end. 65697 is only 161 larger than 2^16, suggesting that it has size 2^16 with some extra bits tacked on. The beginning and end are less sparse, suggesting a "header" and "footer" as some Discorders said. 65697 also factors as 361359, so it could be an image of size 61*359, with 3-bit color. The color could be grayscale (0-7), or single-bit RGB (but why would the aliens have the same number of eye cones as us???) Has it been solved? Is there a public place where people are trying to interpret the message? I thought this might be in #general-discussion on Discord, but I'm having trouble finding discussion of the message in the middle of people talking about aliens. Sounds like there's a confirmed extracted image, with 5 bloby "constellations".